Constructing Global Civil Society: Morality and Power in International Relations

Global Civil Society is a crucial concept in International Relations today, used as both a description of new mechanisms of non-state actor and NGO engagement in international policy-making and as a normative political project of international change. David Chandler critically investigates the claims made by the advocates of global civil society, analyzing the limits of the concept as a way of describing actual policy processes and the political dynamics behind the search for an international source of collective ethical values and social change.

DAVID CHANDLER is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, UK. He has published widely on international relations, democracy and human rights, including Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton (1999, 2000), From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Relations (2002) and Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics (Editor, 2002).